Advanced Users Guide
Hi there! So you're a staff member who has already started using volunteer.legal to coordinate volunteers for immigration workshops. This means that you have already read the Getting Started Guide and are familiar with it, and you have already used Volunteer.Legal to organize at least one workshop. At this point, you are interested in learning some tips and tricks for how to get the most out of Volunteer.Legal. What follows are some potentially useful Volunteer.Legal features that you may not know about (presented in no particular order). # Every organization & collaborative has a unique "next event link" which, when clicked, always directs the viewer to the next upcoming volunteer event's sign up page OR if no upcoming event exists, it directs them to the most recent event in the past. An obvious use for this link would be to add it to your organization / collaboratives website so that you don't need to manually add the appropriate sign up link whenever you have a new event. ## Navigate to the settings page of an organization / collaborative to find the "next event link." # Volunteer.Legal creates sign in & sign out pages for each event, which you may use to sign volunteers in and out using laptops on the day of an event. These pages do not require an internet connection to function. The advantages to using the sign in & out pages instead of using paper are 1) new, unregistered volunteers showing up on the day of the event are automatically added to the event on Volunteer.Legal and, if they indicate they wish to be notified about future events, they are automatically added to the appropriate volunteer list 2) volunteers signing in automatically are marked as attended and have the time they signed in recorded in Volunteer.Legal 3) volunteers signing out are automatically marked as attended and have the time they signed out recorded in Volunteer.Legal. ## How to sign volunteers in & out using laptops on the day of an event # You have the ability to customize the confirmation email that each volunteer receives after they sign up for an event. The main use for this feature is to update the confirmation email with an event's logistics information after you email out the logistics information to everyone. This way, volunteers who sign up after the logistics email has been sent automatically receive the logistics information. Another possible use, would be to update the confirmation email with donation information. ## How to edit the volunteer confirmation email for an event # You have the ability to automatically show volunteers descriptions of the role they have been assigned. This is useful if there is specific logistics or other information associated with each volunteer role. Rather than sending out many individual emails to volunteers based on which roles they've been assigned (or, even worse, one massive email to every volunteer and asking them to "scroll through it for the parts relevant to them"), you can add logistics / description information to each volunteer role in Volunteer.Legal. Then, when you email volunteers, you can just include the brief info that is relevant to everyone in the email, and direct volunteers to click on the "volunteer details" button at the bottom of the email (the button is automatically included in every event email you send) to see both the name of the role they have been assigned as well as the description you gave to that role. Also, if you give volunteers a new role, the description / role assignment they see automatically updates. Role descriptions can be combined with custom confirmation emails to great effect: for example, you can update the confirmation email with a message along the lines of "Thanks for signing up to volunteer! Please give us two business days to assign you to a volunteer role and then click the 'Volunteer Details' button in this email to learn of your assigned role and the responsibilities that come with it. Thank you!!!" This way, volunteers can learn about their role and logistics info without you needing to email them (though, obviously, in this case you do need to be good about regularly logging in and assigning new volunteers to volunteer roles, as well as giving volunteer roles descriptions). ## What is a volunteer role description and how is it used in volunteer.legal? # You have the ability to add "volunteer capacity exceptions" to an event. Basically, say you want to stop sign ups for an event for everyone EXCEPT volunteers which speak Spanish or are immigration attorneys or are staff members. You can do this. ## How to add volunteer capacity exceptions to an event # The volunteer sign in sheet PDF, as well as volunteer assignments PDF, that Volunteer.Legal can generate for each event has some cool features you may not know about (you can find links to these PDFs by navigating to event > coordinate > assignments). ## The PDFs have a hashed URL (so people can't find them by accident) but navigating to them doesn't actually require people to login. This is useful because you can share a live (auto-updating) link to the PDF with volunteers or with staff at organizations that don't use Volunteer.Legal. ## The sign in sheet PDF's "how did you hear about us?" column automatically includes each volunteer's affiliation information (if they provided any) as well as any referral information. If a partner org wants to know how many attorneys have signed up affiliated with a specific law firm, you can just send them a link to the PDF and they can find out for themselves. ## After an event takes place, the sign in / sign out information associated with each volunteer is automatically added to the sign in sheet PDF. If you used the sign in / out pages with laptops at your event, the exact known sign in / sign out time for each volunteer is included. If the column is blank for a volunteer, that's an indication that they didn't sign in and/or out. If you manually mark a volunteer as having attended an event, then the system just uses their shifts start / end times for their sign in / out time. If you look at a volunteer and they signed in and out EXACTLY at the start and end of the shift, it's because they were manually marked as having attended. # You have the ability to set a volunteer capacity for an event but EXCLUDE volunteers assigned to specific roles from that capacity limitation. For example, maybe you only want 100 volunteers to attend your event in addition to however many staff volunteers sign up. For each staff role, you can indicate that those volunteers should be ignored when calculating the event's capacity. This way, any volunteers assigned to your "Volunteer Coordinator" role won't count against the event's volunteer cap. ## See the "advanced option" bullet within How to limit the number of volunteers that can sign up for an event # You can add administrative comments to individual volunteer profiles and you can also filter volunteer lists on those comments. ## Adding admin comments can be useful for noting that a particular volunteer is allergic to something, or maybe they're better suited for a non-client facing role. Volunteers cannot see the admin comments written about them, but other staff users of Volunteer.Legal can. ## If you open up the filter menu, you'll see a text box titled "SEARCH VOLUNTEER PROFILE COMMENTS SECTION." If you enter text in the box and click "filter," the volunteer list will be filtered to only show volunteers who's profile contains the text you entered. There are a number of applications to this feature. Most notably, it allows you to add custom "tags" to individual volunteers (in the admin comments section) and to search on those tags. You could add a "vegetarian" comment to the admin comments section of any volunteers you know to be vegetarians, and then filter a volunteer list to only see volunteers with this "vegetarian" tag. ### How to filter a volunteer list on text within the "admin comments" section of volunteer profiles # You can mark individual volunteers are exceptionally good or exceptionally bad, and filter on those attributes. Exceptionally good volunteers get a star next to their name. Exceptionally bad volunteers are highlighted in red. It is expected that you will remove any volunteer you mark as exceptionally bad from your orgs volunteer lists. Marking them as bad (and explaining why in an admin comment!!) is very helpful for other staff users of Volunteer.Legal who might encounter the volunteer (as well as future staff at your org). ## How to update a volunteer record with feedback that is only visible to Volunteer.Legal staff users # If you delete a volunteer list, you will first be presented with an option to move any volunteers on that list onto another volunteer list. # You can update this Get Help wiki to improve it for other users :D. Simply click "edit" on any page (no logging in necessary!)